GenAI in Education for Industry Readiness

This week , I had the privilege of guest lecturing at London College of Fashion's MBA programme.

My lecture explored the role of GenAI in industry and the current issues facing businesses in the face of this new technologies wide spread adoption. We also explored the future role of consultants and some practical techniques for utilising GenAI to support the cognitive process of developing robust ideas for projects.

Some of the key discussion points included:

• The impact of GenAI, especially in the consulting industry.
• The ability of AI to increase our value through augmentation.
• The state of future organisations adopting AI agents.
• Exploitation vs. protection of intellectual property.
• The importance of use cases and return on investment.

We also experimented with some GenAI techniques:

• Using transcription for idea and knowledge capture and codification.
• The importance of context for large language models.
• Expert panel critical thinking.
• ‘Programming’ Large Language Models (LLM) interactions.

I also had the pleasure of introducing the students to the concept of CONTEXT BLOCKS, exploring how they work and how they can be used to get much better results from GenAI. It’s always a delight to share this insight, as soon as I explain the concept it is always rewarding to see the flare of understanding and opportunity this unleashes in the audience.

The key learning for me however was seeing first hand, the challenges that students and educators are currently facing. One of the key questions the attendees raised was ‘can we use this’, ‘how do we reference a LLM?’. Educators holding a position of ‘you cannot use these tools’ isn’t going to help future leaders who emerge from academia to find industry has wholesale adopted these tools and they are not ready.

Thanks to Helen Beney for inviting me to help navigate this challenge.

Mike.